Electronic systems and circuits have made a significant contribution towards the advancement of modern society and are utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as digital computers, calculators, audio devices, video equipment, and telephone systems facilitate increased productivity and cost reduction in analyzing and communicating data, ideas and trends in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. Frequently, these activities involve rendering and displaying images. However, rendering can involve complicated processing that occupies valuable resources and consumes time.
As user interfaces shift between a variety of platforms, (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, etc.) a number of applications (e.g., video, advanced games, graphics, etc.) face new challenges. Many popular traditional devices lack computational horsepower to render advanced effects such as global illumination, yet users typically expect continually increasing graphics quality. However, different platforms (e.g., laptops, tablets, cell phones, other mobile devices, etc.) usually have a number of limitations, (e.g., power limited, thermal limited, etc.). Many platforms are unlikely to reach desired rendering performance by relying only on Moore's Law alone. Some traditional Cloud graphics approaches attempt to offer a solution, replacing local client rendering with remote rendering. Some traditional systems attempt to offer advantages beyond improved image quality (e.g., virtualization; lower costs and piracy protection) and have started appearing commercially.
While design of rendering pipelines for PCs and consoles is reasonably well understood, design of Cloud pipelines is in its infancy. Prior cloud attempts, including commercial systems, typically use a very simple offload approach: which include synchronously map rendering for each user's frame to a single server. Remote offline-rendering systems like Autodesk360 may also attempt to do this, but the latency is irrelevant and not usually practically applicable to real-time focused applications. Conventional full-frame remote rendering attempts are often limited to simply running them within a virtual computing environment and streaming their output as video. FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a conventional approach in which all the indirect and direct light calculations are performed on a cloud. Some conventional cloud gaming approaches perform all the indirect and direct light calculations on a local client. FIG. 2 is a block diagram of a conventional approach in which all the indirect and direct light calculations are performed on a local client. Either way, the legacy attempts also typically have minimal or no amortization and scalability capability, often both critical requirements for economic Cloud deployments. In addition, traditional approaches also usually couple local device rendering latency to delays in network latency.